http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_13049396
By Glenn Garvin
The Miami Herald
Posted: 08/13/2009
If the Americans who fought World War II are the Greatest Generation,
their children are the Greatest Erasers. That's why all week long
you're going to hear Joni Mitchell singing about bombers turning into
butterflies over Woodstock, and not Mick Jagger warning that murder,
it's just a shot away at Altamont.
Altamont is the rock festival that self-congratulatory children of
the 1960s don't want to remember, the one where Jagger and the rest
of the Rolling Stones watched the Hells Angels they had hired as
security guards beat, stab and kill an audience member right in front
of the stage.
Like Woodstock, Altamont celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.
But, oddly, nobody speaks of the spirit of Altamont Nation living on.
Nor, for that matter, that of the Manson Nation, which also reached
its full dark bloom 40 years ago, with flower children creeping out
of their desert commune to slaughter seven people one of them an
unborn baby whose only crime was to have money.
Sometime in the future, when their grip on the levers of the media
has loosened, somebody will write a real history of the 1960s and the
political awakening of baby boomers that will acknowledge it was
marked by arrogance, self-indulgence, irresponsibility and
totalitarian impulses.
When it does, Woodstock and Altamont will be combined in a single
chapter, for it was the delusions of one that led to the tragedy of
the other. The three-day rock festival at Woodstock was, by any
reasonable measure, a disaster: Hundreds of thousands of narcotized
kids wallowing around in the mud, leaving behind so much sodden
debris that more than one festival organizer compared the place to a
Civil War battlefield.
Their idea of preparation for a three-day campout was to load up on
drugs rather than food, water or medical supplies, and if military
choppers hadn't bailed them out, Woodstock might have ended in the
hippie apocalypse that a lot of people feared. The festival's real
lesson was one already well known to America's parents: Kids, left
without adult supervision, will make a mess.
But the kids made their own myth: that "the brothers and sisters
could get it together if they just didn't have The Man messing with
them," as journalist and filmmaker Michael Dolan put it. Leftist
radical Abbie Hoffman even wrote a book about the festival that
declared there were two Americas: the sex-drugs-and- rock-'n'-roll
crowd of Woodstock Nation, and everybody else, Pig Nation.
The-People-and-The-Pigs dichotomy was a common one in 1960s radical
politics, a literal dehumanization of political opponents even before
Hoffman's tirade had already reached terrifying proportions. After
Charles Manson's band of countercultural assassins butchered pregnant
actress Sharon Tate and three houseguests with more than a hundred
stab wounds, they smeared "PIGS" on the wall in blood. Across the
country, Weather Underground bomber Bernadine Dorhn bubbled over with
approval: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they ate
dinner in the same room with them and then they put a fork in pig
Tate's belly. Wild!"
The logical corollary that anybody who was against The Pigs must be
with The People was put to the test scarcely three months after
Woodstock, when the Rolling Stones put on a free day-long concert
near San Francisco at the Altamont Speedway.
The Stones didn't even want the off-duty cops, carefully coached to
ignore nudity and drug use, who had helped maintain what little order
there was at Woodstock.
Instead, Jagger gave several dozen Hells Angels $500 worth of beer in
return for providing security services.
It turned out that hatred for The Pigs (which the Angels certainly
had in abundance) didn't necessarily translate to love for The People.
All day long the Angels waded into the audience, savagely swinging
weighted pool cues at anyone within reach.
A documentary film crew captured victims in front of the stage,
tearfully gazing at Jagger and mouthing, "Why?"
He provided no answer prudently, perhaps, since when Jefferson
Airplane guitarist Marty Balin tried to intervene, the Angels beat
him unconscious.
Jagger just went on with his set, and as he broke into "Under My
Thumb," the Angels stabbed and clubbed a teenager named Meredith
Hunter to death. "I am not no peace creep by no stretch of the word,"
unrepentant Angels boss Sonny Barger sneered the next day.
The killing of Meredith Hunter didn't prove that rock festivals are
deathtraps.
What it did prove was that Woodstock, not Altamont, was the
aberration; that rock 'n' roll was no more capable of creating the
New Man than were the commissars in Moscow and Beijing and Havana.
Joni Mitchell was wrong: The baby boomers were neither stardust nor golden.
--
Glenn Garvin is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Reach him at
ggarvin@miamiherald.com
.
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